A Series of Forbes Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Dale Renner, Founder and CEO, RedPoint Global

Unification of customer data into one gold-standard view of the customer lies at the heart of today’s modern, data-driven organization adept at scaling personalized messaging and customer experiences. Better data and the ability to turn that data into real-time decisions that drive business outcomes is a big part of what makes the likes of data-native businesses like Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb so successful. One company, RedPoint Global has been working on helping companies better compete with these juggernauts for the past 11 years.

“We started the company in May of 2006 on three core capabilities: Help our clients master their data. Then derive insights from that data. And then, act on those insights,” says RedPoint founder and CEO Dale Renner. The Wellesley, Massachusetts-based firm positions itself as providing data management and customer engagement technology that transforms how brands connect with their customers.

“We had three core principles: One was execution. ‘Redpoint’ is a term from sports climbing. And when you do a climb the way it's been planned, then you achieve a redpoint. I liked the name because it stood for flawless execution. Two, it was important for us to think in terms of delighting our customers. And the third thing that we built the company on is transparency. We were not going to sell things that we couldn't do or we didn't have. And if our clients needed things we didn't have, we would tell them we didn't have them. Our currency was going to be trust,” says Renner.

Today the 150-plus person firm is growing fast. It works with hundreds of brands such as American Express, AIG, Keurig Green Mountain, Rite Aid, Kingfisher plc, and more. And the trust Renner speaks of has allowed the company to experience 40% compounded growth over the past five years.

Renner knows something about data and the challenges of connecting the right data to enable better customer relationships. He was the global managing partner for CRM at Accenture, a practice that he built into a $1.5 billion business, representing 15% of the entire firm’s revenue at the time. Yet his climb to the pinnacle of success at Accenture and a business-building entrepreneur was anything but the perfectly planned and executed redpoint route he named his company after.

He grew up on a farm located seven miles outside of a town with a population of 2,100 people in northwest Iowa. He and his four siblings grew up in poverty and deprivation that harkens back to the worst of the Midwest’s years during the great depression in the ‘30s. His family lived in a one-story farmhouse with no running water. His father left the family when he was 13. “My brothers and I slept in one room. In the wintertime, it was really cold. Think of Siberia. That’s what it was like,” says Renner. “We joined the modern world when we got running water when I was 16. And, of course, we worked hard. When we were little kids, you had to work. We were responsible for fending for ourselves. My mom made 50 cents an hour working at a paint store. I'm a product of the welfare system. The safety net worked. And through the success I’ve enjoyed, I’ve been able to more than pay back into the system that helped me so much when my family needed it.

Renner points back to those years and his mother’s influence as the foundation of his work ethic and his focus on trust and caring for people. He started his first company when he was a junior in high school doing painting, maintenance and general construction work. He was competing against established contractors in the marketplace, so he had to find ways to do jobs better and cheaper than anyone else. “I've always had this highly entrepreneurial spirit,” says Renner.

He went to Westmar College in Lamars, Iowa, on a football scholarship then transferred and graduated with a business degree from Iowa State University. He interviewed with accounting firm Arthur Andersen after graduating. “I was not an accountant. But they were starting what was called at the time an administrative services consulting practice. I had 13 offers coming out of college and this was my lowest paying job offer of all of them. But I thought, ‘This is the kind of place where I can really learn something.’"

The job took him to Minneapolis where there were 35 people at the time in his practice area. “I was very fortunate because, in the early '90s, we were working for some catalogers and direct marketers. And that's where we concepted customer relationship management. Nobody was calling it that back then. Customer relationship management did not exist in the marketplace,” says Renner. In 1992, he gave a presentation to the firm’s (now called Accenture) partners on customer relationship management.

“I had been doing a lot of work in this space. I created this concept (CRM) and told the partners that it is going to be 15% of our business someday. This is a great future for our firm. One of the partners, Joe Forehand, was sitting in the audience who ran products in the US. He said ‘I didn't understand it all, butI want you to come in and do it for me in products in the US.’ Turned out Joe just kept going up in the firm. And I went with him. Joe became the CEO of Accenture. And I was the global managing partner of CRM,” says Renner.

After Accenture Renner became an entrepreneur, running a company named Seisint that linked 20 billion records on people in the United States. The company was sold for $775 million to LexisNexis in 2004. He then bought part of a company in London named ClarityBlue and brought it to the US. That company was sold to Experian in 2006 for $160 million.

“I started RedPoint in May of 2006. And I funded the company, personally. I did not pay myself for six years. Our initial investors came in July of 2012 when we raised $6.3 million. This included my friend from Accenture, Joe Forehand and other guys that I grew up with, in the firm,” says Renner. “We've only ever taken a little over $20 million in this company. We built this company the old-fashioned way.”

Of his success, Renner says, “I think that I was lucky. I think I was in the right place at the right time. I took some chances. I did some things. But the thing that I probably had is that, one, I've got to give a lot of credit to my mother, of course, because she was a very strong influence. She kept the family together. And we were very close. I'm very close with my siblings today. And, two, I’ve been very blessed because I've always had really good people working with me.”

As for what’s next for Renner and RedPoint Global?

“The enemy of the marketer is latency. It's always been latency. If we can remove latency, then we can help marketers react very quickly to a fast-changing landscape, whether that's competitors, products or customer needs. We're using techniques like machine learning to help us drive real-time decisioning. And then we're able to orchestrate that decision. And that's why it works across many companies because everybody has that core set of problems.”

“We want our clients to say to the marketplace, 'That RedPoint company, those RedPoint people were the best people we ever worked with. That RedPoint delivered what they said they were going to deliver. That their software works as advertised. And when I had a problem, I called those people. And they helped me.’ That's what I want for the future of this company.”